For the most part, I really enjoyed working on this project because it was a subject matter that interested me. There were few problems that I ran into while working on it besides just getting the bulk of my research material which took a while, and working on the original artwork that I made.

I think creating the original artwork was what took the longest for me because I had to spend a lot of time trying to perfect it. I am not a fan of submitting unfinished work otherwise I’d probably post more of the pictures I was working on as well.

Working with my cousin for the character blogs also proved to be a little challenging because she lives in Texas while I am in New Jersey so I had to work remotely with her and ask her to take certain shots for me which proved to be challenging at times.

In the future I might decide to finish my other artworks and post them on the page. But for now, I am proud of what I did and the one that I submitted was definitely the biggest and I feel like it acts as a banner for the site. 🙂

I feel very accomplished after finishing this tumblr account and I am pretty happy with the outcome.

For my final project I would like to make a focus on 3 popular movies made by Hayao Myazaki: Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, and Princess Mononoke. These 3 films all seem to have a deeper meaning behind them or are tied to urban legends and I would like to explore those more because I know when I watched the films I never seemed to realize their hidden meanings until I stumbled upon them online. I am thinking about making a tumblr account in which I can post various blogs on each movie and include images that I find online to help aid the feel of the page. I am thinking about making a tumblr because it’s a website that I have been familiar with for a few years now and it would be easiest for me to work with. I know I would be able to do a lot with a tumblr account as opposed to any other blogging website.

The types of posts I would make would include: general synopsis’ of the films, posts about their hidden meanings/symbolism, information about Miyazaki as an animator/director, and posts that act as if certain characters were using the tumblr to talk about related topics. This last part is supposed to serve to bring better understanding to what the characters real purposes in the films were and just to allow me to play around with creating new content instead of just using clips/images from the films. I also want to create some images of the movies, contrasting them with their plots and subplots. I would achieve all of these with photoshop and other image creating software that I have. I think I would particularly enjoy this aspect of the assignment because I like to draw and it gives me an excuse to use my drawing skills. It also allows me to take advantage of all the possible mediums tumblr allows its users to have–meaning I have not only written posts but pictures and some videos too.

Since it is a tumblr I would like to also make a few random reblogs that relate to the films including pictures, gifs, and sounds. Besides our class as the audience, if the tumblr got followers from that I think I would enjoy that a lot. I also plan on having my cousin take photos dressed up as some characters for their own respective blog posts because she likes to dress up as characters as a side hobby…so why not haha.

It’s weird for me to realize that Black Swan (2010) is about 4 years old now. My first time seeing it was in theaters and back then I had no idea how to wrap my head around what I had watched. What was real and what was imagined?

Now 4 years older, and feeling a little wiser, I think I finally understand some of the themes of this movie. The movie opens up with normal narration and slowly starts to lose its sense of reality.

In some parts of the movie you can’t quite tell if something really happened or if it’s something the main character Nina (Natalie Portman) hallucinated. I think after watching the movie a second time over I came to understand that the breaks in reality stemmed from Nina’s lack of ability to deal with the immense stress of getting the lead role in Swan Lake. Pair that with her unnerving need for perfection and a highly competitive ballet company and it’s no wonder that she went crazy! I think the turning point in the movie is after Nina agrees to go out with Lily (Mila Kunis) for a night and ends up unknowingly (or willingly?) taking drugs. From then on the perception of the movie changes as Nina rolls for the first time and has the famous yet imaginary sex scene with Lily.

I think there is also a motif with the rash on Nina’s shoulder. The first time she notices it you see that she tries to hide it. I figured it was probably out of embarrassment. But once her mother discovers it you then realize that she has some sort of bad habit relating to that. It makes me wonder if it happens often? Granted, her mother is extremely overbearing about it so I understand why she would want to hide that from her mother. I also realized that this was the first signs of Nina’s stress coming out. As the movie progresses the rash gets worse and Nina hallucinates bleeding all over the place. Her mind gets the best of her and eventually she starts to see alternate versions of herself becoming more like the black swan that she so desperately wants to convey.

In probably the most confusing scene in the film (for me) Nina attacks Lily who she thinks is after her roll in the ballet. In one moment Lily is dead, and the next she is alive. What just happened? Nina didn’t actually fight with Lily. Lily embodied all of Nina’s insecurities and came after her—but only in her head. In real life, Lily was just another dancer who probably wanted for Nina to do well. What had really happened was an internal struggle between the sweet innocent Nina and the new crazy black swan Nina. And in the end of the movie we find out she stabbed herself. What a twist! The last lines of the whole film, Nina says her last words, “I was perfect” and the scene fades to white as she most likely dies. I found this to be super powerful with the theme of the film as Nina was always after perfection.

I chose this shot in the short film because there was something about it that really appealed to me. Initially I really liked the framing of the picture with the flowers at the bottom in the foreground and the bright background that dims out the busy streets in the background. The frame seemed really pretty to me. I also really liked the lighting in the scene as the light casually bounces off the girls hair and her round cheeks.

I liked this particular frame because of the girls expression in the middle ground. As an individual who is interested in a career in animation I really appreciate when people animate life-like facial expressions. Because people are more complex than just smiles and blank faces. I felt like this frame really brought some personality to this girl and showed her quirky curiosity. This is the scene where the paper airplane catches her attention before flying off to have her chase it. So the way they animated her reaction to the paper airplane was really important even though the scene lasts only for about a second. I also really like that the only color in this whole short is the red from the girls lipstick and the lipstick stain on the airplane. It shows where the focus of the film is: the girl that possesses something about her that makes her stand out and the particular magical paper airplane that will lead her back to the boy.

Movies in 4 frames is a tumblr site dedicated to showing the point of movies in only 4 frames. The 4 frames are taken from a given movie and the idea is to show the main points of that movie from beginning to end. I chose this site because I think the concept of showing what a movie is about in its entirety in only 4 frames sounds really interesting. It also seems really tricky because some movies are way more complicated than what could be allowed in 4 pictures. It made me wonder how I would do that so the creator(s) of this site seem really creative to me. For the most part,

Cabin in the Woods (2012)

skimming through the site I didn’t recognize or havent seen the movies they decided to cover. So I cant personally say how accurate most of them are or if I agree with the frames they chose. After finding one movie that I actually have seen I think the site did a good job of describing the movie in 4 frames without giving away anything about the movie at the same time. I admire that they were able to show the beginning, middles, and end of different movies without giving away anything at all. As someone who hasn’t seen a lot of the movies they posted I find the posts quite interesting. It definitely lets me look at movies in a new light because it made me realize there is so much that goes into a movie and without the proper narrating of it the audience would never be able to understand the story and fall in love with movies the way they all do.